Volume 29, Number 6 · April 15, 1982
Glamour Boy
By A.J.P. Taylor
Anthony Eden: A Biography
by David Carlton
Indiana University Press, 528 pp., $35.00
Winston Churchill records that he only once spent a sleepless night of worry before and during the Second World War. That was on February 20, 1938, when he learned that Anthony Eden had resigned as foreign secretary. A tribute indeed to Eden as 'the life-hope of the British nation.' David Carlton, Eden's latest biographer, however, points out that in 1938 Churchill and Eden were rivals, not allies. The tribute, written more than ten years later, possibly contained 'an element of hyperbole.' This little episode reveals the spirit of Carlton's book, which is a systematic demolition of the Eden myth. The book is by no means a polemic. It is firmly based on a mass of sources: the official records, the diaries of Eden's closest associates in the Foreign Office, and the papers of other cabinet ministers.
Review, 1868 words
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